On Tuesday, 02/28/2012 @ 4PM, I’ll be presenting “The Informational is Spatial” at the Association of American Geographers’ paper session on “Geographies of Surveillance and Security 3: Data, Discourses, and Affects” (session organized by David Murakami Wood and Steve Graham).

Location: The Hilton New York, Second Floor, Sutton Parlor South.

Abstract: As cyberspace expands within young people’s everyday environments, so too does a geoeconomic conception of cybersecurity. My ongoing participatory action research project, MyDigitalFootprint.org, involved a team of youth co-researchers in investigating the production, circulation, and consumption of their personal data in order to collectively address larger questions of privacy, property, and security under informational capitalism. Of specific interest were how the material forms and social practices of proprietary digital environments such as Facebook and Twitter link up with the emerging U.S. war doctrine of cyberdominance. I discuss U.S. cyberdominance as a geoeconomic manifestation of security that aims to reframe a global cyberspace as a component of U.S. territory. Informational flows, from the global to the intimate, are thus cast as matters of national security that must be managed through a plethora of digital enclosure and surveillance mechanisms that are intimately experienced by U.S. youth through their routine participation in proprietary digital environments. Further, despite the “newness” of digital enclosure and surveillance I argue that these mechanisms are rooted in historical processes of environmental control and presuppose a geoeconomic logic of privatization and segregation already operating in our urban environments through strategies such as zoning, gating, and CCTV. I will conclude with a discussion of how the MyDigitalFootprint.org project’s development of its own open-source social network site served as a methodology for understanding the various forms of geoeconomic cybersecurity that become objectified, internalized, reworked, and/or resisted through young people’s everyday engagements with and within proprietary digital environments.

Web-based industry has already become a critical part of our economies. The UK’s industry is already worth £100 billion, accounting for 8% of our total GDP, and is forecast to grow at 10 percent over the next four years. Globally, e-commerce sees $8 trillion change hands each year …

Our reliance on cyber blurs geographical boundaries, breaks down traditional cultural and religious divides, brings families and friends closer together and enables contact between those who share common interests or concerns.